New Dental Implant Type May Help Smokers

Surface roughening helps dental implants integrate with your bone by giving bone material something to grip.”Turned” dental implants use a sand-blasting type method to give them some roughness. This is a tried-and-true method of roughening and gives good results. “Oxidized” dental implants use a chemical process to create surface roughening. This newer method seems to work very well, but it has less data to support it.

In this new study, 40 smokers and 40 never-smokers with periodontitis risk were given a combination of turned and oxidized dental implants to see how well these implants performed. The results showed that the overall survival rate for smokers was 90% and never-smokers was 97%. These are pretty standard results.

What was really special about this study comes when you compare the two types of implant surfaces. Oxidized dental implants performed much worse for never-smokers, but they performed much better for smokers. In smokers, the failure rate for dental implants was nearly five times more overall, though there were no failures among the dental implants with the oxidized surface type.

High Hopes, but No Sure Cure

This study underscores the need to quit smoking to preserve your dental implants. The new oxidized surface may help smokers to keep their dental implants, but more research is needed to confirm this result.

If you want to learn more about how to get great results from your dental implants, please contact My Hills Dentist in Baulkham Hills, helping patients across the north Sydney suburbs.

My Hills Dentist is a full service local dental practice and a national leader in denture and dental implants technology. We offer comprehensive dental services to our neighbours in Baulkham Hills and Sydney, from basic preventive care to advanced restorative dentistry, sleep dentistry, and neuromuscular dentistry. My Hills Dentist was the first practice in the world to offer both FOY ® Dentures and BPS ® Dentures, and the addition of a new digital dental implants process gives our patients maximum flexibility in getting the best tooth replacement option available.

Dr. David Lee is a highly experienced cosmetic dentist with specialized training in dental implants, dentures, and accelerated orthodontics. Dr. Andrew J Ryu is a dedicated and compassionate dentist whose ongoing education is helping him move toward the forefront of the profession. Together they want to give you the best dental experience possible.